The KDE web team is pleased to announce a major redesign of the KDE.org frontpage and buzz.kde.org, just in time for the pending release of our updated Workspace, Application and Development Platform compilation. The redesign is the result of many hours of work by artists, coders, writers and testers. Keep reading to gain some insight into the people and processes behind the retooling.

Impetus

As many people are already aware, KDE recently underwent a shift in marketing and promotion vocabulary. These changes combined with many orphaned and out-of-date pages on the existing KDE.org website were a major topic of discussion at the KDE Marketing Meeting last November in Stuttgart. Once a branding strategy had been agreed upon (KDE is the organization or community, which produces Workspaces, Applications, and a Developer Platform), a site navigation was discussed which can accurately relate this information about the community to new or returning visitors.

During initial mockups, it was discovered that there was an aborted attempt to update KDE.org already in the KDE source repository from two years earlier - this previous attempt was never completed, but some of the framework was already in place to reuse, so work got underway immediately. Now after several months of work, many mockups lay on the cutting room floor, and the final site is ready, aside from a few tweaks still pending.

The Web Team

A major, high traffic website like KDE's should not be left without updates for long periods of time, as the interested web developers get stuck in content maintenance mode, and soon lose interest. Occasionally, a refresh is required simply to revitalise the Web Team. So, briefly and in no particular order, the KDE community would like to acknowledge the current Web Team, many of which have had a few too many short nights since November:

Eugene Trounev (artwork)

Ingo Malchow (design, code)

Ben Cooksley (css, content)

Dario Andres (content)

Frank Karlitschek (code)

Troy Unrau (branding)

Daniel Laidig (app pages)

Emil Sedgh (dynamic content)

Dion Moult (design)

Hans Chen (design)

Nuno Pinheiro (artwork)

Rainer Enders (mockups)

Sebas Kügler (content)

Lydia Pintscher (content)

Luca Beltrame (content)

Jos Poortvliet (content)

Franz Keferböck (buzz.kde.org)

Comments

I'd just like to point out that the web team had a great time working on this site. We know that there are a couple of rough edges that still need improvement, and they'll get fixed over the next few days. In the meantime, please enjoy our hard work.

From clicking around a little, I found a few broken links in the menu. Gives 404s. Do you want such errors reported or do you already have the knowledge, and in such cases where do you want errors/bugs reported?

As it is, in the menu Community ->About KDE the folowing entries fail ->KDE e.V. Foundation, ->History and ->Awards

Should we really have the Documentation link so high under the Support menu? Or even there at all? Many docbooks are horribly incomplete and out-of-date (the prominently linked User Guide and FAQ are dated 2005, and the Plasma one is dated 2008) and Userbase seems a far better place to send people to for now, at least until the docs site can be cleaned up a bit.

Will we be changing the look of other sites like the wikis, dot, bko and docs to match? I must confess I quite like them as they are, but we should probably be consistent?

Website does not work good on 800 pixel wide systems (netbooks anyone?) Shrinking the text size did not help, looks like there are fixed size layouts or graphics.

Scrolling seems very sluggish (may be a Konqueror problem, though, this is with JavaScript, animations, and plugins disabled).

Due to the menu being at the top, the text starts "very late" in page, so that you have to scroll a lot (yes, the forums have the same layout, and the same problem), the large paragraph spacing adds to that.

Opera and Konqueror both. It is all the text, it has an almost invisible white outline using css text-shadow. CSS text-shadow was never supposed to be used for an entire site, and wasn't optimized for it. Now KHTML has new optimizations for text-shadows in trunk though.

I read about this on facebook last night and when I checked the new site, I thougt I was dreaming... looks awesome!

However, there are some issues:
The navigation is a bit too nervous.
For example if you click on community and wait for the page to be loaded, the navigation will slide down as soon as you move the mouse.
And the other way round: If you click on "Community/About KDE", the menu slides/pops back when the site loads. If you want to access a sub-section of "About KDE", you will have to hover the navigation again and wait until it slides down.

I think the new design looks really great. However it would not hurt to make the elements a bit lighter. I mean, http://www.kde.org/media/images/footer1.png is 1.3MB! Not everyone is on DSL. Frankly this is way too heavy.

I like the overall look of the site, but I'm far from convinced by the navigation system. I nudge my mouse over, and it unfolds (filling half the content area on a laptop), then doesn't go away again until I click Toggle Menu.

Specifically, I'd suggest that what appears on mousing over should disappear on mousing out, and that the content of the page should stay still, not slide up and down.

To be brutally honest, it looks really amateurish. KDE has access to many good designers and UI experts. I do not understand, how did you guys manage to frack up your web so badly and make it look like every other garbage pile (aka blog) out there.
Do you really need 250K png as a front page logo?